RS6000 recommended settings for effective power management

This post details the recommended power management and Bluetooth connectivity settings for the RS6000 and any device connected via SSI (e.g. WT6000).  Where similar, this post will also make recommendations for the precursor of the RS6000, the RS507.  There are two sets of settings, one for the device and another for the scanner and both are covered by this post, in addition some general considerations are also given.  It is recommended to familiarise yourself with the reference guides to understand how best to configure the available settings.

References

• RS6000 user guide
• WT6000 Integrator guide
• 123Scan utility for Windows​
• RS507 product reference guide

Overall Considerations

Developing Native apps

Typically scanning with ring scanners will occur without the user interacting regularly with the device and so scanning needs to happen even after the display times out.  Ensure you do not disable the scanner during onPause and carefully consider your application lifecycle so your application is still able to scan when required.  Disabling the scanner in native code will cause a Bluetooth disconnect event to occur preventing scanning.

Compare this with the advice given for developing native applications to interact with an internal barcode scanner with Java or C# (Xamarin) which is to disable the scanner when the device screen turns off (which may result from a display timeout or the power key is pressed).  This advice is given because the internal scanner will enter a power saving mode during suspend on more recent devices which can complicate the behaviour when the device is woken up again; the advice can be seen in the official code apps for the Barcode API on Java and Xamarin.  To clarify, the advice of disabling the scanner when the device sleeps is NOT applicable to Bluetooth scanners such as the RS6000. 

Note that this is the equivalent of the “Keep enabled on suspend” setting for Datawedge applications.

Doze mode / App Standby

For the application to process the received Bluetooth (scan) data, when the device receives a scan it is temporarily woken up to give the application an opportunity to process the scan (“wake on Bluetooth”) which covers the majority of use cases but developers will have to consider doze mode under the following circumstances:

• If the application intends on doing a lot of background work in between scans or following a scan
• If the primary function of the application is not scanning, the non-scanning aspects of the application will still be subject to doze.

There are some great resources from Google detailing the options available for your application to work with Doze mode such as the JobScheduler API as well as resources from Zebra on the topic which cover additional capabilities only available on Zebra devices.

In the vast majority of cases developers creating an application which involves scanning with the RS6000 or RS507 will not have to worry about the mobile device going into doze mode or the application going into standby.  As explained in the Android documentation, doze mode or app standby do not affect Bluetooth connections and so will not affect the ring scanner’s ability to scan or the device’s ability to receive data from the scanner.

Note that the “Connection Idle timeout” setting still applies whose default (600 seconds) is less time than it takes for the device to enter doze mode.

Device going into suspend

As long as you have correctly configured the settings of your device and scanner you should not have to worry about the impact on your application of your device going into suspend. Notably:

• Keep enabled on suspend
• BT Disconnect on exit

Please see the following section for the recommended values of these settings.

Device Central

Recent images of some devices (e.g. TC7x, TC5x, WT6000) ship with an application pre-installed to help you manage your connected Bluetooth peripherals.  Device Central provides an overview of what is connected as well as enabling peripheral specific actions such as paging a misplaced ring scanner.

Device central will impact the behaviour of some of the scanner settings since it is holding an open communications interface with the scanner. Where applicable, this is explained alongside the relevant settings.  If desired, you can disable Device Central using Zebra’s MX AppManager capability by disabling package com.symbol.devicecentral.  StageNow barcodes and profiles to disable and re-enable Device Central are attached to this document for convenience.

Settings

Device settings (Scan parameters associated with the BT scanner)

Device settings can be found in the integrator guide for your device (e.g. WT6000).  The below settings have some applicability to the power consumption of the device.

Note that where the access is specified to be ‘EMDK’ this refers to API access either via the EMDK for Android or EMDK for Xamarin libraries.  Datawedge access indicates settings exposed either via Datawedge profiles or via the EMDK Data Capture profile feature.  These settings are equally applicable regardless of whether you are connecting with an RS6000 or an RS507.

Scanner settings

This is the list of scanner settings related to power consumption but only represents a subset of the total scanner settings.  A full list of settings can be seen in the RS6000 User Guide.  Where available, the equivalent setting for the RS507 scanner is also given; whilst the configuration advice remains unchanged, please consult the RS507 product reference guide for details of the possible and default values as these will differ from the RS6000 where marked with †.

These settings are applied on the scanner by scanning configuration barcodes or by using the 123Scan utility